I'm sorry but personally I think that the LoL punishment system enables poor behavior, internet trolling, and cyber bullying. Most of what Ulanopo has said is good, great, and grand when taken at face value. However there are several areas where they (Riot) fail to understand that their system simply does not EFFECTIVELY eliminate the gross, inherently racist, overly-negative people who really don't care from their community.
For instance, there is no feedback from the report system save a message saying someone was punished based on your report. Ok great, but what about the guy that called someone a ni**er in my last game? I received no message about him. What about the kid who called me gay, a retard, and a fuckwit the next game? No feedback either.
Second, the punishments themselves have no foundation with which to fall back on. Seems like the primary focus is business, not the community. I say this because if you look at Riot's progressive punishment plan, it starts with a 10 game chat ban. You can still play the game, you're just very limited in chat. From there it moves to a 25 game chat ban, and then onto the actual suspensions.
Here we see the flaw by simply viewing it in the objective sense rather than subjectively. You get a chat ban, whoopdie-doo, you'll be back after 10 quick ARAMs to call someone else a douchewaffle or a dungbiscuit because they didn't gank when you wanted them to gank. Same with the 25 game chat ban. However, the real slap in the face to the generally polite comes with the permanent suspensions. Ok so you permanently banned my account, well I'll just create another email address and make another account. Guess what, I'm back to being a 12 year old kid daddy didn't love enough, using my superior vocabulary to torment relatively nice people while they attempt to play a game to relieve some stress. Riot has no outlet for permanently discarding or rehabilitating the people who do not feel the need to "clean up their act".
Furthermore, the justice is skewed. I have experienced this personally. I was in a game where I started 0/6, had a horrible start. I got dogpiled on by 4 other people. I was called retarded, gay, %%%got, worthless, piece of shit, you name it, it was there, verbatim. FYI that's not a bad day Ulanopo, that's being a natural asshole. So I started to defend myself. I had begun to turn things around in game, and I can admit, I became super toxic in retaliation, and my reason is because even as I took the lead in CS and kills, they still didn't stop calling me names and flaming me. Yes I could have muted them all, but the double standard should work in my favor as well in that THEY could have muted me. Turns out most of my toxic teammates reported me. I reported each one of them. The result? No feedback on any of them being punished, but I got a 10 game chat ban and a convenient reminder every time I logged on to clean up my behavior, to which I had to click "I understand". So, objectively these 4 people were basically told it was ok to dogpile someone having a bad game and then be vindicated through this ridiculous report system when that person has had enough. This shouldn't be the standard anywhere.
The problem is right there in Ulanopo's reply. Triggering a review is difficult if you don't report someone. So when 4 people pile on and report you, it triggers a review against you. If you are the only one reporting them, it appears to do nothing. Designed to give players some slack? Where was my slack when you only sent me a copy of what I said in that game? Why weren't the other 4 people who were negatively affecting gameplay in the chat text? Was I talking to myself? Did I click the report button for no reason? You're not showing decent players any justice like that. NO ONE should ever be expected to accept that type of behavior and language directed at them just because you have installed a mute function in your game and sprinkled a few conduct rules on your EULA. I will probably get a 25 game chat ban if I ever experience that type of flaming or bullying again.
It's not perfect, and it never will be. I suppose it must be deemed as an acceptable side effect of having a worldwide, millions+ community. As of right now, this report system is a joke. There is no justice, and there is no TANGIBLE consequence. That's why most people are saying things like "go ahead and report me" in game. It's like a wrist slap. They know they can go be assholes on their smurfs.
Being in the military, I am not one to bring a complaint to the boss without having a solution or an idea to toss on the table. As a suggestion, change one of the chat bans to a store ban, i.e. you can't buy anything (IP or RP) for 10 days if you've been a dick. Deny RP/IP accrual. Deny party queuing. Put in a negative experience initiative, where you lose levels for being a toolbag. If they are always going to be able to play through smurfs or regulated chat (aside from permanent bans), dump on their ACTUAL gameplay like they have ours. Things like that would totally show the community you're trying to make it better.
Thanks.
